Born from violence

On Ash Wednesday 2016, a Japanese steel pan player called Asami Nagakiya was found dead under a cannonball tree in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Not only did the police fail to find the killer, but the mayor – who was later sacked – blamed Nagakiya for her own murder because she was wearing a skimpy carnival costume.

In Passiontide Monique Roffey turns this real-life tragedy into a feminist fable. Her murdered pan player, Sora Tanaka, is killed on the final night of carnival in the fictional Caribbean country of St Colibri. Cuthbert Loveday, a rackety and slightly corrupt police inspector, predicts trouble the moment he hears that a body has been found. “Men, here, killed women they knew and lived with, mostly. Almost a rule. But this woman lookin foreign and that would be hell on a plate.”

When the mayor criticizes the victim for wearing her “pretty mas costume” – a bejewelled two-piece masquerade outfit – three local women decide they’ve had enough. Tara Kissoon, a feminist activist with candy-pink hair wearing a biker jacket, heckles Inspector Loveday at a press conference, saying that femicide is endemic in the culture. “Women are hated here. Openly. Man can kill a woman any time and know he will never face a court room.” She teams up with a journalist and the leader of the local sex workers’ collective to set up a protest camp on the main square of the capital, Port Isabella.

The larger-than-life characters and at times ribald humour turn what could be a polemic into an exhilerating fantasy. While some of the women’s demands are phrased in the jargon of modern activism – “gender sensitivity training for all politicians, the police and public figures” – Roffey’s use of Trinidadian English gives the narrative authenticity, particularity and lyrical energy.

The women call for the oldest form of female protest ever: a sex strike. The turning point comes when Daisy, the wife of Errol Solomon, the pompous and insensitive prime minister, announces on television that she too will join the strike. Years earlier her sister “disappeared”, but no one would talk about it, let alone try to find the killer. Her husband puts her under house arrest, but it is too late – she has galvanized thousands of women across the country.

Roffey evokes the exuberance of the women’s camp – a bunch of old ladies bare their bottoms to scare off a Swat team who come to break it up, and Sora’s band, the Meteors, play steel pan through the night. One of the most moving moments comes when a group of timid, battered women arrive from the suburbs to join the “different tribes from the women’s movement”. Still, the menace of male violence is never far away. Sora’s murderer stalks the camp. His thoughts are rendered in poetry:

is me who make dis revolution happen
if ah ent kill she, den no revolution go happen
yeah, reckon it makin sense to go an kill a nex one

Sora herself has become a spirit, watching the women from the cannonball tree. “They didn’t see my killer in their midst, loitering, man with steel fingers.”

While the book has a strong feminist, anti-racist message, Roffey avoids preachiness. Tara muses on the “violence here, born from violence which came by ship, which was once European, which had never evaporated” – yet one of the most sympathetic characters is the forensic pathologist, a white man. Sharleen Sellier, the journalist, weeps as she contemplates the men in her life – father, son, lovers. “Did feminism address this: the tender need of man for woman and woman for man?” she asks herself.

For a while the women’s demands, which include the sacking of Inspector Loveday and tougher legislation to tackle domestic violence, are mocked and ignored. Solomon uses the excuse that, as Black men are oppressed, Black women should fall in behind them: “We share an enemy, our ex-colonisers … You are, in fact, missing the point”. But eventually, as befits a novel set during Passiontide – the final two weeks of Lent – redemption comes through repentance and love. The prime minister wants his wife back. The only way is to listen to her and her comrades’ demands.

In her author’s note Monique Roffey points out that, according to the NGO Womankind Worldwide, 81,000 girls and women are killed every year – half of them by an intimate partner or family member. Passiontide is a distinctly Trinidadian novel, but it could have been set anywhere.

Lindsey Hilsum is Channel 4 News’s International Editor

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